City Council - Regular Meeting

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Good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday, 03/10/2026 study session of the Olympia City Council. For the record, we have a quorum with all council members present tonight. So we have one business item for the study session this evening, and it is the Olympia Fire Department's community risk assessment and standards of cover briefing. And we have, our fire chief, Matt Morris, with Hillary Flowers, our deputy chief, and Stephanie Porter, who is our our business and operations specialist with the Olympia Fire Department. And I'll turn it over to the chief.

Thank you, mister mayor, members of council. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share some information with you this evening. We're super excited to share the work that we've accomplished over the last eighteen months or so on the standards to cover. And, so what I'd like to do tonight is I'm gonna kinda offer a little bit of an introduction overview of kind of the the vision and intent, and then chief Flowers and Stephanie are gonna walk you through some of the specific information and data, and talk about our organizational performance and the kind of the strategic intent on how and the opportunities that we may have to improve some of that performance, and then we'll kinda wrap it up after that. We first came before council in mid twenty four and presented our strategic plan.

Talked about our mission and our vision and our and our shared beliefs as an organization and our intent to build community trust and to help build a safer, more vibrant community. As a fire department, our greater purpose is simply just to take care of people in the community, whatever that may be, and that to meet them where they're at. In in order to do that, we need to ask a lot of questions and be familiar with and educate ourselves as to about our community and the needs of our community and the people in it. And so from that strategic plan into the work plan, we came back last year, mid last year, and kinda presented to you the concept of a standards to cover. And so tonight, I'm excited to present to you a final draft of that.

Everybody in this room is very familiar with a comprehensive plan, and this document really is a comprehensive plan of sorts specific to the fire service and fire services in the city of Olympia. It's data centric. The model follows that of the centers for professional service or public safety excellence, which is the fire accreditation process. And so we use that process to kind of set the template for us. So the the overall arching intent and the vision of this process for the Olympia fire department is to be able to be transparent in our community about this is who we are, this is our community, this is what we do for our community, and this is how well we do it.

And here's the plan to get better. Right? And so, that's what we're excited to share with you. As we've gone through this process, we found things that we needed to improve on immediately. One of that was, our data management, data gathering, data tools.

Stephanie Porter has been a fantastic asset to our organization. She you know, her job description is not specific to that of a data analyst, but she has a very strong ability and skills and passion for it, and and we're very fortunate to have her on the team. We had to lean into new data collection software. One of those you'll see tonight is the is the StarCourse system. And in the midst of that, of course, then at the national level, they changed the national reporting software.

It was changed on us. And so that delayed us probably by about six months, in our process just because we had to implement that on the national the national, requirements. So having said all that, here we go. So why do we have a standard to cover? It provides a platform for measurement improvement, continuous assessment, and clear expectations.

That's the bigger why. Because if we're going to be an organization that exists to take care of people, then we need to understand what the people need, and then we find a a solution to their needs. Right? So how do we do that? So this document you have in front of you, if you wanna follow along with me, because I'm sure it's it's a very long lengthy document.

I'm not going to spend this evening reading it to you or going word word for word on it. Break it down into a couple big sections. The first section is we we completed what's known as a comprehensive risk analysis of our community. And so we looked at everything that we could find about the city of Olympia to help identify the risks in the community as it relates to public safety, the fire service, emergency medical services, and our core services. As you look in at this document from page six to 49, really starts to identify and speak to those things.

I'll kinda pull your attention to page 24, which is about the service area boundaries. And so we look at the boundaries of the City Of Olympia's city boundaries, and then we have our fire station planning districts. Four fire stations in the city of Olympia, each of those is the planning district. That will be a theme throughout this evening as we talk. And and as we go through the data, it'll talk about the different fire districts and the data and the performance as it relates to each of those.

If you kinda look beyond that and then onto page 29, I'll draw it to you. Some of the data in in the GIS layering in the census data that we're able to collect and some some things to consider as we look as our planning zones and we we establish our our delivery distribution system, the way we provide our resources to respond and mitigate risk in our community, couple of things that stand out to us. One, we break it into our four response areas, the four stations. And if you look at on the graphs that you see on page 29, the percentage of seniors in each of our areas, Station 3, which is that's kind of that Southeast direction of the city, 30% of the population in that area are 60. Kind of a significant statement.

Right? So as you consider that, if you look at the diversity index, diversity index speaks to the likelihood that the people in that area are more diverse or less diverse than the county as a whole. So it's kind of a comparison index. And so you see, like, areas like Station 2, Station 4, the West Side, East Side, their diversity is greater than that of than the rest of Thurston County. So just to kinda give you some a reference.

And as you kind of thumb through the next few pages, you see a lot of graphics for each of the response areas. It's the same information for each response area, and we just tried to pull apart as much dependable, reliable, defendable information that we could to identify any gaps in equity and any gaps in service as it relates to the community that we serve. What that drives us to next then from there is we start talking about what are our core services. So currently, the City of Olympia fire department has core services. Fire suppression, emergency medical services are obviously the two big ones, wildland fire, technical rescue calls, and then marine shipboard.

Fire suppression, emergency medical, these are our our core services because they're they're the response to these types of emergencies in our community. Not based on the frequency, but also based on the the consequence of that of an incident like that in our community, the impact it will have in our community, as well as the demand on the fire department to look and mitigate. How much of your fire department resources have to be dedicated to mitigate a certain type of an event? Right? What's the total impact in the community?

And so those core services kind of emerge. It leads us down into the next piece in an area that we identified early on, an opportunity for improvement in the organization is risk reduction behaviors and risk reduction programs. The fire department is a 117 people. A 101 of those are dedicated to emergency response. Right?

We only have four people dedicated to the fire marshal's office, which is a big piece of the cares or, you know, the community risk reduction behavior. Right? And so our opportunity to expand public education, expand risk reduction campaigns, we're partnering with the Thurston County through emergency management. And so we're looking and seeking opportunities to have a bigger impact in our community on the prevention preparation side of things. Right?

And so I think that there's room for there in the future as we partner with it it it becomes a really good opportunity to function on a regional level. And that kind of speaks to the the risk reduction when I mentioned emergency management partnership with Thurston County. The next part, we talk about the historical demand for services. And so we start now we know our core services. We know our community. We understand the the pieces and parts and specifics of our community. Then we look at historically, as a fire department, what have we been doing? And so we pull all of that data, and we start to look at, well, things about, oh, well, how frequent does that happen? Is that something that happens a lot? What does it take to manage that?

And it begins a conversation about this this thing we call the risk assessment or the critical task or risk analysis. And so we start to group our our call types primary call types, fire suppression, EMS, tech rescue, and we start to group those by low, medium, and high risk. And each of those areas then are have an associated number of firefighters that are required to mitigate that critical tasking. It's defined by the National Fire Protection, Association seventeen ten. This type of an event requires this many people because you have to get these many tasks accomplished.

And and you can kinda see that as we get into, like, pages 92 and on based on each of the different types of risk based on the critical tasks. And so that begins and starts to create what we call an effective response force conversation. This effective response force is broken into two main sections. One is your first arriving, first due, and then the rest is the balance of the force. And so a good example is a a bedroom on fire, residential bedroom on fire in in the city of Olympia.

That risk category requires 17 firefighters to mitigate per critical tasking per at seventeen ten national standards. The first piece of that is the first arriving engine. We want that within a certain time frame. That's a three person initial response. And then the rest of it comes with the following. And then we have a a performance that we wanna measure. How long did it take us to get all 17 members to medic on scene to mitigate that? Right? And so that becomes this conversation about first two effective response force and complete effective response force. Those are two of our key performance indicators you look at from our ability to have an impact on an incident.

That bedroom's on fire, it's not going to get better until the fire department arrives. Right? Today's construction types is you see flashovers or when the fire flashes from one room to the next room occurring anywhere from six to nine minutes because of the nature of the materials today. So your first arriving engine you want on scene, national standard, seven minutes, six seconds, and you want them on scene 90% of the time to initiate initial fire operations. It's the same conversation about emergency medical services.

What why do you want your first arriving medical response in seven minutes? Because science will tell you that without that, cellular death and the ability to survive a critical medical or a critical trauma is very nil if it takes us longer than six six to eight minutes to get on scene initially. Right? Cardiac arrest survivability. And so that's where those numbers come from. That's where the critical testing comes from. That's why we talk about why do you send three engines, ladder, correct? Why does all of that go to that call? And People ask, well, why do you send an engine and an aid unit and a paramedic unit to a a sick patient? Well, that sick patient, because of the critical tasks, requires that many people to do the work.

It's a national standard. Tracking? Making sense? Okay. And so that kinda leads into this whole risk by low, moderate, and high risk on for each of the service or key service deliveries that we offered to the community that the community requires of us. Two of those are areas or services that are emerging and becoming higher risk in our community because of the significance of their events. So we look at the frequency, we look at the consequence, and then we look at the impact. So the frequency, how often it happens, obviously. Right? The impact and the consequence talk to how many fire department resources does it take to take care of, and what's the consequent?

What's the what happens in your community if that thing happens and we don't manage it quickly and well? Right? A bedroom fire in the community versus a large fire in one of your production facilities, and that would result in the loss of jobs. Both fires in your community, both happen infrequently, but the consequence in your community for one is much greater than the other in your in your community's economic impact and social impact, things like that. So as we as we lean into all of those things, then it becomes this conversation about okay.

So now how are we doing that? How are we performing in that with our current distribution and our current resource allotment? And so we do a self assessment. Right? And so that becomes this process of data analysis, which for some of us, we get a little excited about that. Some people don't. I kinda do. So I know. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's different things for different people, for sure.

So I think at this point, what we'll do is is I'll have chief Flowers kind of start to begin the conversation with you about operations and and how we provide the services we provide and at what performance levels. And I think Stephanie is going to to wow you with this software system that we're able to procure this last year with the the Dark Horse system and its ability to offer not only kind of a a look back at your data and and and the ability to kinda give you a retrospective look, but it has a a risk analysis perspective look where you can kinda do some more looking to the the future. And and I think that's exciting for us. So chief Flowers.

Good evening. I wanted to start by talking about where our stations were and what we had at each station just so that when we get to the risk model and we let Stephanie do that, you have a framework to look from. So station one has a ladder truck, an engine, and a battalion. Station two has an engine and an aid unit and a medic unit. Station three is a single engine house, so that's off of 22nd Boulevard. And station four also has an engine, age unit, and medic unit. So that is our complement. That's our minimum staffing, which is 24 personnel every day. So every day, we will make sure that we have twenty four minuteimum staffed. I I don't have slides.

You do. Thanks. Another important thing we highlighted a little bit, Station District. So Station 1 has a district of 5.6 miles. Station 2 is 7.7, And that's the biggest area. And we start talking about performance. That will make more sense. It's a big area and a lot of places to go. It will make sense when you see the performance in that area. Station 3 is 5.4 square miles and Station 4 is 2.2. That will also make sense when we start talking about performance because they have a small district. Their response is in a small area. They're able to get there quickly.

Okay.

So fire suppression. Chief Morris talked a little bit about risk, and we break risk down into medium risk and high risk as far as structure fires go. So a medium risk structure fire, we would consider that kind of your room and contents house fire. That's going to have an effective response force of 17. So we're going to ask and make sure that we have three engines, a truck, battalion, and then either an aid or medic unit.

And we'll sub those in kind of in and out depending on where they're at in the system. That's our effective response force that we want. So, if we don't have that, we will use our mutual aid or we will pull from other areas to grab that minimum response. In a high risk, so something like commercial or apartment, a medium rise or assisted living, so something that has a ton of consequence also has impact, we're going to have a bigger effective response force. So high risk, a commercial structure fire will have 28, and we will pull our mutual aid partners all of those commercial structure fires.

They will all have some sort of mutual aid component to them. If we think about wildland fires, so that's on page 60 in your book, we really start to think about those as May to October. We still do some some fires. I think you just saw that we had one in the encampment this weekend. Not unusual. But we can use our mutual aid partners. We have some staffing. We have a brush unit that we're able to cross cross staff, and then we can partner together with DNR to help mitigate that. So we have contracts in place for overhead support when it comes to big incidents. Most of our minor incidents we can handle on our own though.

Tech rescue, we provide within the city, we provide confined space resources for public works, but we also participate in a countywide sort program. So that's our special operations rescue. We do that county wide because it takes a significant amount of resources to staff a sort call. So minimum is six, and that's mandated, again, by NFPA and held a little bit more tightly with WACC. So there are very defined WACC requirements as it relates to entering in any confined space.

So we train with that. We have a mutual aid agreement and the whole county comes together to work on our sort program. Marine and shipboard is an area where I would call this a weakness. So, we have a boat, but we don't really have what I would call an effective response from a shipboard or a shipboard fire. Really, it's contain and try and isolate. So we don't have a way to mitigate that. We rely on our mutual aid resources. So we have West Pierce. We have Anderson Island. We have Tacoma Fire.

But those are going to be impacted by both how the water looks and how quickly they can get there, and then if they have staffing available to staff those and respond mutual aid. Most of those, again, are going to be defensive. So we're not really going to be able to have an offensive or a quick response with, shipboard fires. And then I want to change subject. So questions before we move to the next bit of info? No? Maybe? No? Okay. Okay.

So I'm going to call to the annual review. So you should have a copy of the annual review in front of you. If you turn to page two, can see we broke out the number of responses by each of the station areas. We have several of the last years, so 21 through '25 to see that data. And then at the bottom, you'll see that we talk about our fire loss.

So how much is that consequence from fire as it relates to structure fire loss? So what did we lose this year from fires? So this year we would add to our total. We'll talk about the Landis Point apartments in a couple of minutes. That fire loss was about $800,000 If you turn to page five or the next page, we talk about the top five incidents.

And I think this highlights each of the differences in the different station areas. They really do kind of have their own kind of flavor and what things they respond to most. Station four is located near Lily Road. We can imagine what they see. They see a ton of geriatric patients all like we would expect. They have a ton of adult family homes. They have a ton of skilled nursing facilities. They're right next to the hospital. We would expect to be that primary would be that patient population. And that's reflective in the data.

If you think about Station three, that's kind of a bedroom community. That's where all of our residential is. They don't have the number of assisted living facilities. They don't have skilled nursing facilities within their district. Station two's area, same kind of as station four. They do have skilled nursing, assisted living, both in there. So that impacts their call volume and their responses. They also built those long after station two, so they're not really in an ideal way. We would have asked them to build them next to Station 2, but they didn't. If we look at the different types of fires, those again I think are pretty telling of the station.

So if we go down to kind of that middle part and we break down, we see a lot of Beautybark fires in Station 1 And 2 And 4. 3 is really house fires. Right? That is what their that is what that kind of district witnesses. Then you'll

Chief? Yeah. We have a question

from council Absolutely. Three.

Thank you, mayor. And you actually just started you you just mentioned my question, Why is beauty bark so hazardous? How like, what is going on?

Well, smokers aren't always great with their disposal, and so you get a lot of cigarette butts into the beauty bark, and that's usually the primary cause.

Thank you. I learned so much already today.

And then you'll see outside rubbish, trash, or waste fires. Really, that's warming fires. So I think there's some data points that could be cleaned up internally, and that's a lot of warming fires is what you'll see from that. It just kind of depends on how it gets categorized that day. You'll also see that with, I think, cleanup a little bit with Nearest and narrowing in. They did give us more options in Nearest, so I think you'll see that data get better over time. And then the last, just high hazard type by station area is pretty self explanatory, what we would expect to see. Okay. On to the fun part. So reliability, we're going to circle back to reliability.

Reliability is the ability for a station to be in their home station area and respond to the call dispatched to in their station area. So if we're at Station 01, they're off of East Side Street, their reliability would be, are they in their station area and are they responding to a call within their area or is another station area or district calling them. So that's what we call reliability.

Just to offer perspective on that is when we talk about that first due unit and that effective response force, the ability to put a resource on scene within that first seven minutes and six seconds 90% of the time. If that's not the if if that apparatus is not in their district for that call and we have to send, like, station one to into force area to cover that call, we obviously, you'll never make that seven minutes, seconds. As soon as you have to go to the second due or the next out station to take that call, it it kills your performance. Right? And so

Performance is response time in its entirety of collection. We'll break that down here in just a second. NFPA seventeen ten, we've kind of highlighted our goal is seven minutes and ten seconds. And I'm going to ask you to walk between the next two pages. So if you turn to the following page Oh, jeez. Oh, I switched. She'll go back one more. Will you go to slide 16? Other way. Yep.

One more. So alarm processing is the time from when the call comes into TCOM until it is alerted within the station. So that's the alarm processing time. TCOM made some huge advances in the last year. They went from an analog system to a digital system. So, we now have digital dispatch and they only dispatch a single time. So, once they get the call received, they can hit the dispatch receiving information about the call and change resources if needed. But they were able to take off about twenty five seconds off of their time. So their performance has increased dramatically within the last year. So kudos to them for upgrading technology.

Turnout time is the place where I, as operations, can effectively change. So we can do some work in that area within. Turnout time is the time from notification until they're able to hit responding in the rig. And then last is travel time. And travel time is what travel time is. Travel time, though, is mitigated or influenced by traffic. It's influenced by their ability to move within our traffic structures. So when we see things like medians or a narrow street, that does make it more challenging to pass. And then just kind of time of day is the other thing that generally will impact those. Those three things together create performance.

So we put that all together, dispatch, our turnout time and our drive time to create our response time, and that is what we measure performance is that total package.

Did you cheat? Yeah. Do you keep do you keep data when you have calls that, I guess, cross, station boundaries?

Mhmm.

Okay. It so is that factored into travel time at all, or do you just keep the data separately?

It's not factored into travel time separately. It it does just impact their their time. So we can look later, I think, in the presentation. Maybe you can pull up the slide that has call concurrency. So, dark horse tells us how often we have call currency. And we have roughly about 30% of the day, we will have more than one call happening at a time. And that's what's going to affect that being pulled into a different district.

In addition, Mayor so when we're looking at performance, we look at performance as two things. The first two, ERF, and then the ERF as a total. And so the the first arriving unit, we we look at their performance for that first arriving. And and so when we look at their total performance, their drive time would be part of that. And so if you if you were to pull a single call and look at the structure part and how long did it take to get the first engine on scene, if that doesn't meet the seven minutes and six second requirement, then you would pull it apart and find out why. And you would see, oh, well, their dispatch time was fine. Their turnout time was fine, but then they had a fifteen minute response time. That's because engine four went to engine into station one's area or whatever. And so then you would be able to start to do your analysis as to why you didn't meet your performance.

So if we flip back to the sheet that talks about reliability and performance, we can see our reliability in all of our station areas, except for station three, is actually pretty darn good. It's almost to where we want it. Station three's reliability is not quite where we want it. And we know that it's not where we want it because we use engine three to cover for training. So we pull that engine to cover into an area that has more call volume so that we're able to maintain our training and cover calls in the core of city.

So we impact their performance because we don't have enough units or we don't have the units to cover to cover for training. That makes sense? Oh, you weren't going to? Okay. If we look down at performance, we see station one is at 67%.

Station two is at 36%, so 90% of the time they're not quite where we want them to be. When we look at impacts and the reason why, if we went back to the slide that said, how big is the district area of District 2? Two's district is 7.7 square miles. So, we know that that has a tremendous impact. We also know that one of their highest areas of call volume is located right next to Yep CMC. And so, that think about kind of where they're located. They're on the West Side. They're off of Kenyon. And then think about where CMC is and the drive time it takes to get there. So that's where a significant amount of their call volume happens.

And we'll walk through that when we get to dark horse. Station four we look at Station four's area. Station four has a small district. It's 2.2 square miles. It was built once we had some good data. It was placed in an area that we knew we had some larger call volumes. And so it really is what we would ask of a station. It's in the area. It's in the area that it receives the most amount of time or the most amount of calls, and it has a small district, so it's able to respond and keep both reliability and performance. I'm gonna pause there and make sure we don't have any questions.

No? Okay. So I'm gonna give Stephanie a second to catch up and bring up dark horse.

So I'm gonna give a little bit of an intro for this because we're super excited about the software platform. And so we partnered with Lacey Fire District three to get to bring the cost of this down and to get it within our existing budget to have it implemented in the annual licensing fees. Our IT department did a fantastic job of vetting it and helping us get it implemented. And so through some regional partnership and some cost savings, that way we're able to to bring this tool into the organization, organization, which I think you're gonna find interesting. So

This is the home screen or kinda what they call the headquarters screen within Dark Horse. Chief Morris has highlighted this is the first time as an agency we've really started to look at data. So this is the starting point. This is where we go from, and this is how we determine both what we're doing but also how we can improve. We've started the conversation and started educating our workforce about what it means to have performance, about how we personally impact performance, and about controlling the things that we can control, so things like turnout time. So we're able to share these numbers. We can look at them daily. We can look at them weekly, monthly, quarterly, and then, of course, annually. That's what we use to build this annual report is this platform.

Councilmember Green has a question.

Thanks, mayor. So you can look at it all the time and in all those interviews. Have you established, like, ideally, frequently do

you look at it, or how frequently do you assess it? We've been looking at it monthly. Whether or not we start to do it more frequently, I think, is still to be determined. But ideally, we wanna make sure that we're looking at it at least monthly. Okay. Thanks.

I would offer that. It just kinda depends on what the topic is you're looking at based on dataset size. And so, you know, I would caution that we would look at things that have very few occurrences because, you know, swing in your percentages will be great with a small dataset. And so, you know, when you look at call volume in three's response area, we're gonna wanna look at a longer time frame because it doesn't run as many incidents in that area versus, like, Station 2 on the West Side.

Okay. Well, you you addressed my question perfectly, which was just really around I know the temptation to look at data all the time because you have it all the time is really exciting, so I appreciate that you've set some some boundaries around that.

I'm gonna ask Stephanie to go to station two's area, and we're gonna talk about performance. So one of the places in station two's area that we know we could improve performance is in their response times. Station two has an analog alerting system. So that means, like TCOM, they upgraded to digital. We believe that's about a twenty second delay.

And I know that because I've sat in the station, I get the alerting on my phone, and then I wait for their station house tones. So at night, that's impactful because it means if they don't have a phone that has an alerting system on it, they're waiting for station tones. So I'm gonna ask Stephanie to change and subtract twenty seconds off of their current run times and look at station two's area and you'll watch what happens directly around that station. And you'll see that their performance improves because their turnout time could improve. So that's where we start thinking about how do we make our decisions to affect performance.

Do I invest in a station alerting system because I know that it will improve performance? Absolutely. That's an easy way for us to improve performance is to improve with digital alerting. Next places to improve in station two's area is I told you where all of the call volume was. It was right next to CMC.

There's about six addresses there that make up about 800 calls a year. And if we add a station in that high volume call area, you can also improve. And so you can see the performance over on the left will tell us what it does to our overall performance, not just the performance within the city. But you can see just by looking what that does. So, we start to think about long range planning, this is the tool that we use because it does predictive modeling.

So, you could say, Gee, Flowers, I want to look at a piece of property located here. And we can go and find the exact grid within dark horse and say, well, what would that do to our performance? Is that the best area? Is that where we should be investing our future in? Questions?

Yeah? Thomas, member of Vanderbilt.

I'm gonna ask an obvious question the public would probably want to know is if you go right to the edge of the West side of the map there, there is a fire station that sits right on the edge that's a regional fire that sits sits right on the and I know that we're not a part of that, but it's right up against the edge of that red. Mhmm. I just I'm I'm I I understand that we have different Boundaries? Boundaries, and we have different resources, but it's right there. I know that's a point of conversation, but

I just wanna ask. We can't forecast the data within this model set without asking our partner agencies to also have it. So we could get that data if that agency used this same data set because we could import their data and then actually talk about what it looked like to have a mutual response or how that would impact those response times. Okay.

I'm glad you asked this question because I had this very conversation with the chief, what, maybe two weeks ago. In a one on one, we were talking about all this, and I said, hey. You know, McLean's got a fire station on the West Side. And as we as we think about deployment of services and what's really important here to think about is we talked about boundaries, which means they have their service area where they're tracking the same information about them being first first on scene in within their areas. So if they're first on scene within our areas and then a call comes in their boundaries and they don't have the same kind of backup, then they're gonna be late to the calls within their service area.

So even though they're adjacent, they have an area that's that's that goes further out into Black Lake, and it makes it much more challenging for them to be first responders to us. Now mutual aid's a different story. Right? Because we can be first on scene, and they may be the closest ones to give us mutual aid. But when it goes the other way, it makes it more difficult. Did I did I hit that okay?

No. I think that's a a fair characterization of it. I I think that, you know, our responsibility to our taxpayers, to our communities, to provide services within the areas that they pay their taxes to support. I think it's mutual aid, auto aid systems that run across jurisdictional boundaries are beneficial, but it should never be the solution to a first due consistent basis. It should be only in the event of, you know, extreme circumstance.

I will say that this is the the conversation what is that creates a conversation about regionalization of emergency services because this is a very common occurrence where, you know, building a fire station on an edge of a jurisdiction doesn't make a lot of sense. Right? Because then you're only responding into half of your area. But when you share those resources in a regional it makes the the cost the pro rationing of the cost and the contribution to it equitable to the jurisdictions, then it makes sense. Right? And so

I'm glad you're I'm glad you're saying that because most of that is to retirement homes and the services. And I'm like, wow. If if we were regionalized, hypothetically, having an aid car just sitting over there could help a lot just thinking about that.

The the story I shared earlier today was in my previous experiences, two jurisdictions sharing a border, not regionalized. The one jurisdiction had financial difficulties, and they were forced to close fire stations. So they chose to close the fire stations that were on the border of the other jurisdiction, knowing that that jurisdiction would then cover their city, which created a legal battle between the two jurisdictions because the jurisdiction that was paying for it took exception to that. So it's something to think about.

Council member Gilman.

To to follow on this thread, first, I'm looking at this this the Station 2 and modeling an another station near Capitol Medical Center and the various elder care facilities. Thus, either first or second most prevalent call out of Station 2 was invalid assist. And I'm I'm wondering if I mean, because we've talked about that as a as a potential for both education and alternative response if it's somebody fell out of their bed and the staff there can't waste them back in. So how do you

I just She's done a lot of research.

Yeah. So tell me a little bit of and and the chiefs told us these stories before, deputy chief Flowers, about you have to have staff to run a fire engine in case there's a structure fire. But I'm just I can't help but think about the EMS calls separately from the fire calls when you're thinking about a second West Side station?

Yeah. So one of the things that I first looked at when I got into my role as Assistant Chief of EMS is we can't possibly go to all of these facilities this many times and it be for the right response with the right emergency. Right? And then I asked Stephanie to pull data. And we got into the weeds, like down to the number of calls, the type of calls, the resource that showed up, and then the outcome.

And I will give the nursing home some credit in the sense that, one, I do think most of the time they use the right resource. So we may go for an invalid assist, but per protocol, if that person is on a blood thinner, the nursing home is always going to mandate a transport. And that's to mitigate their risk. So because of the patient population that they serve, most of them will be on some sort of a blood thinner. Most of them will require transport.

It's very rare out of a facility that you just go and help someone up and then they don't request transport. At home, most people will have a slip and fall and oftentimes it's just a help up. They had a rug and they slipped or they slid out of their chair, they slid off the bed and we can assist them back up. In the nursing home, they won't mitigate risk in that way. So we're very careful to educate them to make sure that they understand what our job is versus what their job is. But to their credit, I actually think they're using the appropriate services within our agency the way that we should be using them.

This is a the the one of the driving forces behind the the need for the BLS aid unit at the West Side. And so now those calls are now handled by the aid unit, and we're not rolling the fire engine to that that we used to have to because it was the only resource available to us. And so we're now we are able to send the correct resource to the type of call to the nature of call and the extent of the emergency of that call and mitigate it with appropriate resources rather than, you know, a fire engine, which was not necessary there. So that's one of those contributing factors of that aid unit.

We're gonna go to Station 3 next. And when I think about from an operations chief, what do I do to mitigate miss with risk within a station area? One of the things for station three is being able to keep it in its home area, being able to keep it in its district. There's a couple of ways we can do that. We can add resources to the core.

Something like an age unit to station o one allows that unit to be in its station district most of the time. The second place to mitigate risk within station three's area is by adding a fourth firefighter. So if we go back to our response and we think about effective response force, the other way that we do that is that's a big district, and we're not particularly close. So the second in engine is a distance. It averages probably ten to twelve minutes to get that second in engine into district three's area.

You can add a fourth firefighter, which allows them to mitigate their own emergencies immediately. So by state law, we have to have two firefighters in and two firefighters out before we can make entry. So if we go back to our medium risk, which is primarily what station three's area is, it's primarily homes, and we think about what do they experience. They experience kitchen fires and bedroom fires. And the way to mitigate that risk is by having an immediate response and setting that station up to manage itself.

All different ways we can think about how do we effectively get them their effective response force quickly. And then last, wanted to end with station four. So station four, we highlighted, had been built a little bit later. It's our newest station. It has the smallest district, and it was built in the area that has the highest volume of calls. So you see immediately around that station, it actually is all green because it's where it's supposed to be. It's doing everything that we ask it to do. It has good performance. It has great reliability, and it's built where we want it to be at. So kind of the everything that we could ask for from a station.

And last, I wanted to end us on just kind of a an experience that we had and what it actually means to get an effective response force. So at the January, we had a structure fire at the Landis Pointe Apartments, which is in Station Four's area. And I'll give Stephanie a chance to get where we were. So we talked about call concurrency and how about 30% of the time our vehicles or our engines are out on other calls. And I want to say everything was perfect this night.

So if there was ever a day for it to be perfect, this was the night. Everyone was at home, in their district, in their stations, where they were supposed to be. So the Landis Point apartment fire had amazing, dispatch times. So their dispatch time from time of call entry to time of dispatch was about fifteen seconds. So whatever the caller said to paint the story, I give them great credit for because the dispatcher immediately toned a commercial fire alarm package.

She received the call fifteen seconds later, she does that. She stays on the phone and takes the call for about another minute or so, so it does end with its final alarm processing time. But our first arriving unit was on scene in five minutes and fifty five seconds. Engine four was on scene at six minutes and three seconds, and eight zero four was on scene at six minutes and six seconds. Other things that went phenomenal.

The engine officer gave a great size up and called for a second alarm. So we knew that that was going to be a big fire just by the arrival and by what they found. So they called for additional resources. So on top of what we would ask for for that high risk package, we asked for that again because it was such a high risk and we knew that we were going to need additional resources. By the time we got to our full effective response force for the initial commercial fire alarm structure package, it was fifteen minutes and thirteen seconds, which is actually phenomenal response to have that many resources in their home district and able to respond at that time.

We were also lucky that it was at night, so our implications were much less. Sometimes that area can get congested. We also didn't have to fight traffic coming from the West Side, and sometimes that can impact response times. So this is what we want it to look like. We talk about meeting that NFPA seventeen ten standard as being there in seven minutes and six seconds.

And they were able to do that. The first arriving engine was there in under seven minutes and six seconds. We had a fire loss of about 800,000, which is significant. I will offer, had the first arriving engine not been there and it was our second arriving engine, which was engine one at ten minutes and five seconds, we would have lost the building and it would have gone into the second building. I know that listening from their report, I know it from watching kind of what they had said in their reports and then talking to them, it was starting to extend into the next building and we were fortunate to have crews there be able to mitigate it quickly.

That's the difference between a couple of units or $800,000 so the consequence, or losing two full units by not having it. So highlight and a kudos to the crew. They did a phenomenal job with that structure fire, but it really highlights what we talk about when we talk about effective response force and meeting those times given to us by NFPA.

City manager, Bernie?

Yeah. Not not a question. As as they finish with the presentation, I I just wanna say, you know, I've been here twenty seven years, the last seventeen of those in the city manager's office, and this is probably the most comprehensive set of performance data that I can remember ever seeing. And it's something that we've been asking for for a long time. The ability to really dial in to just get an answer to every question we have about response, about deployment, about safety of our firefighters and making sure they have what they need, about community safety and and response time.

And the ability through the standards of cover work, their strategic planning work, and the performance data that you see in front of you just presents us with a really amazing opportunity to continue to figure out what are all the tools and resources that we need. We started to have that conversation in Finance Committee last week. You have a FIRE CFP that's pretty robust for the first time in a long time, and we're going be talking about that as a larger council real soon. And we have that because we have data that suggests what we need in order to to to really be at the standards that we want to be within our community. Now it's gonna be hard to get there overnight because we're talking about millions of dollars when you're talking about new stations and and and and new apparatus.

But there's a pathway in front of us and some data that supports it. So I just want to say thank you to chiefs for all this work because it sets a new standard for how we're going to measure performance in the fire department. And it's something that, chief, when you started, I told you we we we we dramatically need it, and you went right to work on it. So just a lot of gratitude.

Thank you. I appreciate that very much. It's been, yeah, it's been a good project. It's been a a good process in the organization. And chief Flowers mentioned a couple times that our ability to be transparent within our own organization and and share our our organizational needs and performances with our own folks and so that they have a better understanding and feel for the work that they do and the impact that it's having in the community.

You know, I think when we look at our performance as an organization, there's a couple of key factors that I think as a city and as leaders in the community that we should consider. One is the impact this has on our WSRB rating, which is our insurance rating for all of our occupancies in the city. We're currently at WSRB two. The best is one. There's not many of those in the state.

We went from a 1.4 to a 1.8 in our last rating. And as soon as it hits a 1.9 to a two, it'll go to a three. And so it's drifting that direction because of the impact that the community changes in our ability to meet performance standards. And so we have an opportunity to get ahead of that over the next five to ten years and prevent that drift from occurring any further. I think that, as we look at this, there was a couple of key points that I would emphasize to you as a policy making group.

One of those is that there are emerging risks in the community that we have not traditionally had to mitigate. One of those is the wildfire risk. I think we all support the conversation around climate change and the impact of that's having in in our climate here regionally. You know, anecdotally, if you talk to a firefighter thirty years ago, they never ran a brush fire on I 5. It wouldn't go anywhere.

And now today, a a brush fire on I 5 is a big event. And it's driven by the fact that climate is changing. It's drier. It's hotter in in the summers, and we have bigger weather events that contribute to that. So that's an emerging risk that we are currently not well suited to mitigate because we have not had to do that before.

And so the conversation about training, equipment, apparatus, legal implications, our ability to support on a regional level, at the DNR level, and deploy not only within our own boundaries, but outside of that state region. You know, the conversation about the fires that we saw in in Los Angeles last year and and why didn't the city of Olympia, you know, deploy to that, we're not suited for that. We're not equipped, trained, or or prepared for that. If that's a vision that we wanna have to be a deployable agency, then there's work that we would want to do. But it's an emerging risk within our own boundaries.

Right? And so that's something that we need to want that we wanna invest in and get ahead of sooner than later as an example. And so chief Flowers mentioned that we use engine three to cover other districts because of call volume or training demands. Engine three is the slowest district when it comes to frequency of events because it has the fewest number of incidents. So it's a risk management that we make as an organization.

It's more likely that the next emergency is gonna occur downtown than it does in that area, and so we use that engine to cover downtown when downtown's busy. Right? We're robbing from Peter to pay to Paul to a certain extent. And there's the potential that that's going to come back on us, that we're gonna pull three to cover one's area and and something's gonna happen in three's area, and we've left it uncovered. So it's something to think about that we didn't used to have to think about because the demand for services and the training demands were different twenty years ago.

It's an emerging change. Right? And so in the last two and a half years, we've hired nearly 50 new employees as a result of attrition as well as the BLS program. There are 96 people assigned to operations as a total, 96 positions. Half of them have been in the organization less than three years. So the demand for training is greater than it's ever been. Alright. Our firefighters make decisions based on two things, what they know from experience and what they've been taught. If they've never seen it and never been taught it, they won't know and have the ability or the skills to make good decisions, and we set them up for failure. In the absence of experience, I can't create experience.

I can only create training. Training is essential in our organization more now than ever. Right? We can't rely on the institutional knowledge and experience of the thirty year employee that we used to be able to rely on. And so we have to train, which means we have to cover areas while they train.

They have to be able to train uninterrupted. So I have to be able to take a station out of service for a couple hours and let them train and cover them with another. So I'm gonna move resources around and do my best to spread the coverage around the city. So that's a risk that we're taking that I think as a city, should be talking about planning for, and how do we help mitigate that as we look to the future. And then the last piece I would offer is the the the cost and the ability to plan to the future for resources and deployment of existing and future resources.

It's a long term conversation. It's predictable, and so it's preventable. We should never sit in this room and be surprised that we need to add resources. By the time we're adding it, you should have heard from the fire department 32 times at least that it is next year, two years, three years, next year, and here it is. Right? That's how this should work for you, and especially for the city manager. Right? I should never, as a fire chief, be in the city manager's office talking about the need for a fire station or fire apparatus from an emergent crisis perspective. Should have been talking about it for five years by then. Right?

And so that's the intent with all of this comprehensive planning and data analysis so that we can get ahead of those things and and make good sound decisions based on data that supports it and not based on our anecdotal gut or our feelings. Right? And so I appreciate the opportunity to do this work. I appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation with all of you and just try to influence and, you know, inspire in the conversation that, you know, the ability to provide exceptional public safety services is never easy, and it's always expensive. Right?

Most of that we do we have absolutely no control over. Right? We don't control the price of apparatus. Collective bargaining is collective bargaining. It's all legally driven. We just have to figure out a way to support it. Right? And so as you all know, this is my last meeting. Right? Next week is my final week with the city. I wanna say thank you. I am full of appreciation, and and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to have been part

of the

organization to offer influence or inspiration. I appreciate and will always be thankful for the trust that the city manager and all of you have placed in me. But even more so, I'll be always in awe of the trust that the members of this organization placed in me. You have an exceptional fire department. You have exceptional people that work in your fire department.

They are some of the hardest working, most dedicated, caring, compassionate professionals that you will ever have an opportunity to interact with. I've been doing this for thirty six years. It's an exceptional fire department. Right? Our role, our opportunity as leaders is to take care of them so that they can go take care of the community. Being a firefighter, being in public safety, being a first responder, that work that they do is really lousy work. It's dirty. It's scary. It's dangerous. It tries to hurt them.

It will hurt them. Firefighters have a 20% greater likelihood of being diagnosed with cancer than the general population, fourteen percent chance of dying from cancer. The number one cause of death in firefighters in the nation today is suicide. They do a work that nobody else wants to do or can do, and they do it willingly. Right?

I just ask that as we move forward, that we've remembered that if we take care of them, they will take care of our community. Right? And that the work that they do is exceptional. So, again, thank you for your opportunity, for the opportunity to be part of the team. I will take it with me forever. So thank you.

Thank you, chief. City manager, Bernie.

Thank you, mister mayor. You beat me to it, chief. So I know. Well, you know, I'm not gonna be there next week because I'm gonna be in DC, and I'm gonna miss your your final day here. But I got you tonight, so I'm not gonna miss this moment. So I appreciate counsel giving me one here. So, you know, chief, I think back to when you were hired and and we had a conversation in my office about all the things we needed to accomplish. And I gave you this laundry list, I wrote them down as I was sitting here. We need to we need to catch up on our hiring. Right?

I know you're not all the way there, but boy, we've come a long way in in a short period of time. We wanted the the the member the members of the department, I remember when I was interviewing all of them about what we needed to achieve, they said, just want direction. We want a plan. We want to know where we're going. Check. We have a new strategic plan. We have comprehensive plan for the fire department. I asked you for it to help for a better long term financial strategy so I could better inform the council and keep them in the know about what our needs are into the future because I knew we were falling behind. And you've you've delivered all kinds of tools to help us do that. I asked you to get BLS implemented in a way that it could actually pay for itself.

We're getting pretty close to that. I mean, I think this year will be the year we actually come out ahead when when we look at GMT billing. So just job well done. I asked you to build your leadership team. And you've really done an amazing job of building your leadership team and building those around you.

And then finally, said it's something I ask of all directors, and you say it all the time, is just take care of your people. And one of the things I appreciate about you, I've been to just about every one of your promotional ceremonies, and what is it you ask every one of your BCs or your lieutenants that you promote, one of the first things you say is, take care of your people. And if you take care of people, everything else takes care of itself. And so you've done that. You've just been a gift to the city and to the fire department.

I hear it over and over and over again from every one of those members in that fire department. They have just enjoyed every moment of having you as their chief. And so it's with mixed emotions for all of us. We're all happy for you and Val and to to head off into what you're doing. But in just a short period of time you've been here, you've left an incredible legacy that was that's gonna live far beyond your time as chief. So just have nothing but gratitude for you and appreciation, for everything that you've brought to this role because we needed you, and you were the absolute right person at the right time to set us in a different place. So thank you.

It's well said, Jay. Thank you. Councilmember Gilman.

I just wanna piggyback on what Jay was saying. And and first, it's thank you. I have learned so much over the last couple of years both about the the fire department and the industry standards, but also more broadly about another way of doing strategic planning and assessing where we're at in the department. I I think this model has has helped to inform our other budgeting and analysis work across the city, and that's that's a really big impact. It's a really big impact.

So there's I'm both impressed and convinced by the standards of cover, by the strategic plan. And that that leads me to to wanna urge us all that if you feel like you need more numbers, let's ask for more numbers. If you need more stories or translation of the numbers, let's ask for them. Because I I think that there's, the really obvious thing that we've been buying fire engines using year end funds, emergency sorts like, oh my goodness. We need to buy a multimillion dollar vehicle.

You know, that's that's something that just like with any sort of piece of mechanical equipment like that, it has a life. And we've we've really pushed the envelope on on our great mechanics keeping these vehicles up and running, but they're they're tired. So that's that's one thing this points to. And the the the other thing that's really makes an impression on me is when we had those triangle, your special Herod's Pythagorean, whatever it is there, it's it's kinda like a a a risk, like, you know, which which way are you gonna move to mitigate risks, the the big chunk of those triangles off to the left is the relative risk to our firefighting staff. And I just wanna I wanna acknowledge that, that that is one of the things that we specifically mitigate as we talk about what resources we offer to the department.

And as we go for those goals, they're they're not only to make sure that the community gets the fire service that they're expecting, but also that our firefighters go home to their families at the end of the day. So I that's just a long way of saying I look forward to the capital facilities plan conversation, and I'm optimistic that if we're intentional together, we can find a way to make this dashboard tell the story that we would like it to tell. So thank you, chief.

Alright. Any additional questions or comments? Yes. Councilmember Vanderpool. So this is

I was thinking about this tool and thinking about future because you mentioned future usage. Right? And I I'm very I'd be very curious about if you put in future land use map or any of the other planning that we've done through the comprehensive plan. Just drop it in there. Right? The mall area redevelopment. Right? And how much that would tell the story to the public of the need. Right? Because we only have one truck with a tiller. Right? That just and then or engine. And then I had to say engine because someone would correct me later and give you a call and be like be like, Robert, that's not what it is. You've you've ridden along with us twice. You don't know what you're anyway, yeah, I think of, like, Station 2.

Right? It doesn't even have the capacity for one of those. Right? And if we built taller buildings in the mall, suddenly we would need that because we'd be sharing it from downtown and back. Right? So I I I wonder about using the tool to think about where we think the trends are gonna be going. Right? Right? Yeah.

Yeah. I I think that's a great perspective and insight. I you have the ability if anything's a GIS layer, it has the ability to be laid on top of this, and we can use the the vendor to do that for us. It's also a great opportunity to that when we sit in those planning meetings with, you know, the other city departments and and directors to to kinda demonstrate and show them the impact of the development conversation that they're having. What happens if we put this type of development here or that or the other?

And and we can show them based on historical data from around the nation what an anticipated impact would be that offers the opportunity for planning. You know, it it when we increase building risk, we increase population density, we increase health risk, you know, and the ability to manage emergency services all, you know, those things all start to change. And, I think the most important thing is to be, you know, two decades ahead of that. Right? And so then we're able to actually manage that. So Yeah. Thank you.

Councilmember Green.

Yeah. Thank you, mayor. Thinking of that thinking about that Capital Medical Center area, obviously, city doesn't own land there, and land there is some pretty high demand between the medical and commercial uses. Are there any cities, municipalities that you're aware of that there's any kind of public private partnership? Because I have to think that for the folks operating, particularly the medical establishments, the assisted living facilities, whatever that is, like, it's probably a problem for them as well if we're having to get into, you know, eight minute response times and somebody's laying on the floor waiting for assistance to to get transported.

I just wonder if there's anybody that you are aware of that's kind of figured out that opportunity to say, hey, the folks operating in those areas, it would really benefit them to have better fire service. It would really benefit the city to not have to try to buy land there that's fully owned. So I don't know.

Yeah. Appreciate that question. Absolutely. It's it's insightful that that I think the opportunity to do any kind of partnership, whether it be regional or public private partnership, are always something that we should explore. Other agencies do that. They lease facilities. They don't have to purchase or build traditional fire stations. There are nontraditional solutions to it. And all of those things are possibilities. What I would offer is that our intent to improve performance, that we recognize that the most difficult thing in that conversation is about purchasing land and building buildings.

It's the most difficult thing to accomplish cost wise and planning wise. And that anything that we can do to improve performance that has impacted it like what was mentioned about the station alerting, you know, the investing in a in a digital station alerting that can take twenty to twenty five seconds off your notification time, which puts them out on the streets thirty seconds quicker, is a is a great solution. Right? Traffic control devices, traffic, you know, signaling, things like that, and investing in that. There are other opportunities.

And so we want to start with the least costly or the investment piece, what's our return on investment. I think there's education within the facilities is a great opportunity as well. But, yeah, I think ultimately, the public private partnership does occur. It's not common, but it does occur. I think the the partnership between public safety entities, regionalization or partners in sharing resources, things like that, costing in allocating those costs is another very I think becoming a very common occurrence. It it's you know, like I said before, providing public safety response services in any community is difficult and expensive. And any opportunity that we can share those costs and still achieve performance, we should be looking at.

Thanks.

Alright. Well, if there are no additional questions, I have a couple, and then I also have some closing comments to wrap us up if no one else does. Okay. Alright. Maybe we can do rapid fire. Send you out with a bang. No. It shouldn't be too hard. My first question is, is there a average time amount of time that the national standards change?

The national standards does not change frequently. It gets reviewed about I think it's every ten years that the the NFPA standards are reviewed. And and recognize that response time standards from a national level is meant to be a you know, it's a big comprehensive process to cover every community in in a nation. You know, my experience with other agencies I've been part of as well as the fire accreditation process I've been part of is that typical most communities that I've been aware of, that their first due response times are usually right around eight minutes, right, at 90% of the time, and that their full response is somewhere between eleven and twelve minutes 90% of the time. This becomes their benchmark targets that they're trying to achieve.

And so if you looked at at our city, Station 4 is basically there. Right? And so we're we're achieving it in certain areas, but not in other areas, and we're gonna achieve it better at certain times a day versus other times a day. And there's different influences to why we're not achieving that. So the solution is not going to be just one you know, the solution isn't just build another fire station.

Right? And so it's it's about other conversations along the way. And so, yeah, I think that, you know, those standards are meant to be the best guideline. If you look at major municipal areas like New York, Philadelphia, those kinds of places, they have fire stations on basically every other corner because their density is so high and the traffic and the congestion is so big that, you know, they pull out of their station and it takes them eight minutes to go a block and a half. Right?

And so they build more fire stations versus other areas like rural population density will drive your response time standards as well. And so it's not practical to expect to have eight minute response times if you if you live in an area where there's only a 100 people per square mile. You know, when you start to get past 3,000 people per square mile, which the majority of Olympia is considered an urban population density, then it becomes response time standards are going to be the fastest standards. Right? The city level standards.

And so, and as you get outlying areas further away and that density starts to drop, then those standards can decrease. I've seen I've seen rural response time standards as high as fifteen twelve to fifteen minutes for a first arriving engine in a rural setting. Right now, we don't have any rural settings in the City Of Olympia within our our jurisdictional boundaries, but we do kind of flirt with the suburban versus urban density in certain areas.

Yeah. Thank you. So I wanna go back to what you had said about, wildfire response, for a moment. And I'm just curious, is that something that is unique to City Of Olympia firefighters, or is that something that is common in our region or statewide?

Can you I would offer my perspective in the in the time that in the last ten years that I've been involved with this process is it's an emerging risk in Western Washington as a general statement. I think that some jurisdictional boundaries have a greater risk than others. King County, anywhere you have the true urban interface the residential properties and commercial properties are building into the wildland interface on the edge, that becomes a greater risk. And then you have the the the wildfire risk within your urban boundaries, you know, the washes, you know, Perceval Creek, those types of risks as well. But by by far, Western Washington, the emergence of large wildfires on the Western Side Of Of The Cascades, if just in the last ten years is it's the fires we see today were unheard of ten years ago.

The fire at Lake Cushman last summer was something that nobody's ever seen before. Right? And so it's not that's only going to continue. And and the fear of this coming wildfire season in Western Washington because of the lack of the of snowpack is in the wildfire, wildland urban interface circles is and emergency management is is have some people pretty terrified.

And so and maybe you're on your way out just in the nick of time. So maybe, deputy chief, this is for you. But what's the plan to to get our firefighters ready?

We've been working on that within training. So they do have some initial training and the ability to respond and cover wildland. When we think about being deployable, the requirements are quite a bit higher. And we also have to have rigs that can deploy. So we think right now about just mitigating our local risk. And we're not quite ready to take on being deployable agency. So we're not ready to deploy into other agencies. And that really is going to take a decision at the policy level to say we're willing to invest that time and the annual training. So again, everything is driven by training and the requirements to have training. In the wildland kind of area, they also have different categories that they have to gain experience on actual fires.

So for example, an engine boss or someone that we would call a lieutenant here, In the wildland fire, they would call that an engine boss. And they would credential them within that area based on experience. They would say, you have to have this many hours leading your engine company and signed off on this number of skills to be qualified to do that. So we would really have to make an investment to say, we're going to go and we are going to be a deployable agency or we're going to stay and be a city response and use our mutual aid partners and just be trained. And right now, we're working on it.

We have a couple of newer hired folks that came with some pretty significant wild end experience. And what we've committed to is ensuring that they maintain their experience. So we do have a couple folks that we just hired in the last two years that have engine boss criteria. We will support them to maintain that criteria so that we can figure out what we want to do as an agency and what we, as a city, want to do policy wide to support them. But that's kind of our strategy right now.

Alright. Thank you. Yeah. I'm just glad. I didn't wanna leave it on that note. I wanted to make sure that our community knows that we're we're preparing. So thank you. Well, chief, it's been a huge honor. I am also gonna be in DC next week and won't be able to, you know, be there for your sending off. But I'll just say that, obviously, you've been a people first kinda guy.

From the moment we first met, you were honest about the burnout of our firefighters, you know, and and, you know, really just being honest with us about those challenges and what you need to sort of address those things. So as the city manager said, there's been a lot of hiring. There's also in addition to BLS Cares, we have or or, excuse me, BLS, we also have Cares, which was, you know, something we also were finally able to kick off under your leadership. And I'll just say that, you know, when you are the head of a department, things make they make its way back to us even if you don't think it does. We hear things.

And so I'm gonna take that as a sign that no news is good news. I think that you clearly, from what I can see, have had an impact on the morale and caring for the people of our fire department is caring for the people of the city because they're the ones that are responding. Right? And so I just thank you for being very values driven for fitting into the culture here. You know?

It's it's always a you know? When you hire somebody to come in and you know, whether or not they're gonna be supportive of the city's values. And I'm proud to say that you have been every single step of the way in your leadership of our department. So I thank you for that. And and I wish you all the best because you deserve it. Right? And come back and see us and come bother to deputy g. Alright. Well, is there anything else? Anybody?

Yeah.

Yeah. You you Yeah. Yeah. You definitely should. $5. $5 is

a plus.

He's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna take it and throw it in my fire pit. Alright. Well, this is the only business item that we have for tonight. So thank you again, chief. So at this time, we're going to recess for five minutes, and then we're going to reconvene for an executive session pursuant to litigation and potential litigation. No decisions will be made, and we will meet in Room 423 for up to sixty minutes. And after which, we will be adjourned for tonight.